THE AIRSCOUTS’ FORTRESS
So I told them my story from the beginning. I spoke of the days of the
Institute and Lazaroff’s experiment, of my awakening within the cylinder
at the end of a century of sleep, my flight from the cellar and my
discovery by Jones. I continued, telling of my first bewilderment in
London, of David’s kindness which had saved my reason, described my
summons that morning and the relays of spies who had led me to the
Temple. When I narrated my discovery of the cylinder containing Esther’s
living body I raised my eyes to David’s and perceived that I was no
longer in the position of a prisoner awaiting death.
David’s aspect had changed; he was trembling violently and struggling to
speak. He looked fearfully at me, and Jones was hardly less moved. Then
Elizabeth slipped her hand into mine.
“We believe you, Arnold,” she said.
Three times David attempted to speak while I was sketching briefly the
remainder of my story up to the point of my encounter with Elizabeth,
and each time his voice failed him.
“Arnold, forgive me,” he managed to say at last. “We know that every
word you have told us is true, if only you had told me before! But I see
how incredible you must have thought your story. Now listen to me!
“The horrors of this government will not last much longer. Plans are
well under way to make an end of democracy and restore liberty to the
world. You have unwittingly placed a wonderful weapon in our hands. No
man can be neutral in such times. Now, Arnold, you have to make a
decision which will affect not yourself only, but all of us, Britain,
the Federation, and the race of men. You must choose your party.” He
turned to Jones. “He must be told nothing until the time arrives,” he
continued, assuming a tone of authority. “You will say nothing—nor you,
Elizabeth.”
He turned to me again.
“Arnold,” he said, “you must make your choice now. Lembken needs you for
reasons which are patent to us, thanks to your statement. If you go back
to him he can give you power and liberty to lord it over the people
until the quick day of reckoning arrives. If you join us you must become
an outlaw and an associate in the most desperate endeavor, play a
leading part and share our dangers.”
“How can you doubt me?” I asked. “I am with you, now, and at all times.”
David held up his hand. “Wait!” he said. “You must first understand our
situation, and why we are here tonight.”
“It is not necessary, David,” I answered.
“Yes, it is necessary. Because you do not know the depth of our
intolerable bondage. I am going to tell you of my own life, that you may
judge.
“I begin with my father. As I told you, he was epileptic in youth. He
outgrew the attacks, and because the Liberal government never dared to
enforce the Defectives’ Law which it passed in 1930, he was able to
marry, much later, a girl to whom he had been engaged for many years.
They had lived quietly in what was then called Wales, in a rural
community that had somehow managed to escape the excesses which began in
1945.
“But my father was a marked man, because he was on the secret
defectives’ list, and a Conservative. A few weeks after his marriage the
storm of revolution burst over Dolgelly. The army of clerks and civil
officers that followed the troops of the victorious democracy raked the
country fine for victims. With his young bride my father fled to the
mountains, where I was born, and they existed there, heaven knows how,
till an opportunity arrived for flight abroad. When the restoration came
he returned, and rebuilt his ruined home.
“My father was a student of history, and he knew that the peace which
had descended over the distracted country was only a lull in the storm
of violence. He resolved to teach me all the old knowledge, which had
fallen into decay. He wanted me to play a leading part in political
life, as his forebears had done. But the second revolution was upon us
when I was a youth of nineteen. Fortunately, my parents were both dead.
“The mob started burning defectives then. For many there was the chance
of submission to the new government, nominally under Boss Rose, which
Sanson was constructing; but there was none for me, since epilepsy was
then, owing to the ephemeral theory of some forgotten scientist,
regarded as the unpardonable sin. I managed to escape to Denmark, and
spent the next sixteen years upon the Continent, wandering from place to
place as the Federation came into being. I married a Swiss lady at
Lausanne, where Elizabeth was born. We had to fly by night, when the
child was a week old. My wife could not survive the journey over the
mountain passes in the middle of winter. She died in what was called
Austria, two days after our arrival there. With Elizabeth I continued my
flight eastward, and found refuge in Greece.
“I said that the mob had begun to burn defectives. But the Council
changed that. The word ‘productivity’ was the new fetish, and, seeing
that the murder of half the population would decrease the output, the
Council resolved to imprison defectives in the workshops for life
instead. But even this did not work. In 1999 Boss Rose became alarmed at
the depopulation caused by the universal terror. Men denounced their
brothers for small rewards, and wives their husbands, when they grew
tired of them. Men and women were crossing the North Sea in tiny skiffs,
or perishing in the waves, flying into the glens of Scotland, organizing
in bands and living a hunted life within the forests that had begun to
cover the country. Boss Rose issued an amnesty decree. Defectives who
returned and were able to produce a hektone and a quarter monthly were
not to be proscribed. I returned to Britain and secured employment in
the Strangers’ Bureau, which had just been established, a post for which
my education and experiences abroad qualified me.
“Ten years ago Boss Rose fell under an assassin’s dagger. The Council,
under the influence of Sanson, issued a decree that no faith was to be
kept with defectives. Sanson, then supreme behind the mask of Lembken,
began to harry the people. It was then he introduced his system of
mating under Council supervision.”
“It is abominable!” I cried.
“Yet, like all our institutions, it has its roots far back in the past,”
said David, “and only needed the abandonment of the Christian ethic to
spring full-fledged into existence. The Prophet Wells foreshadowed it,
as did also Ellen Key; and on this point the followers of Galton joined
the Socialist government in a concerted attack upon monogamy. This, in
fact, has been the crux of the old battle between Socialism and the
Church: on the one hand the old ideal of the family as the unit of
society, and marriage an indissoluble bond; on the other the individual,
free from responsibility and seeking his own fancied freedom. Even in
the Prophet’s time America had practically abandoned monogamy, while the
anti-social propaganda was being secretly carried on by the teaching of
what was called sex hygiene in the schools. When the churches
compromised with divorce, Protestantism finally collapsed, and flung
half the civilized world back into paganism.”
“It was said that the children—” I began.
“The answer was State rearing, Arnold, as had been urged by many men and
some women of liberal and progressive minds. We tried that in 2002.
Elizabeth was torn from me. For six months we had public crèches in
every city. There was much public dissatisfaction, though the children
were not taken from their mothers till they had been weaned. That was
the time when the Guard was formed, consisting of Janissaries trained
from youth by the Council and pledged to them. However, what caused the
abandonment of the crèche system was a quite unexpected happening.
Despite the utmost care, despite a process of automatic feeding in
germ-proof incubators, which made it impossible for any of the little
inmates to lack the advantages of the latest hygienic theories, the
children died.
“This phenomenon was never explained satisfactorily, and the mortality,
which ranged from eighty to ninety per cent, shocked the Province
profoundly, for it meant an intolerable lessening in the productivity of
the next generation. The children were returned to their parents.
Elizabeth, who was above the age curve of maximum mortality, came back
to me, and, in spite of rigorous inspection by the officials of the
Children’s Bureau, I have managed to keep her.
“But I must be brief, Arnold. I have told you that it was decreed no
faith was to be kept with defectives. The net was cast over all who,
trusting to the proclamation, had returned from the forests and waste
places, and from abroad. Gradually they were sorted out and ascribed.
Many records of heredity had disappeared during the Revolution, but they
had my father’s in the Bureau of Pedigrees and Relationships. Since then
I have waited in suspense daily. They know it, and, if I have not been
condemned to the workshops, it is through Lembken’s favor, for he was
head of the Strangers’ Bureau before the assassination of Boss Rose, and
I worked under him.”
“But is there no law?” I cried. “Is there no charter of liberty at all?”
“Why, yes, Arnold. We still have Magna Charta, and Habeas Corpus, and
many other documents, and occasionally these are invoked. There is an
old man in the paper shops who has appealed against imprisonment and
carried his case through twenty or thirty courts since he was shut up as
a boy, and if he lives long enough his appeal will come before the
Council. But you see, Arnold, one of the first acts of the victorious
democracy was to institute the election and the recall of judges.
“They think I fear for my own liberty,” he continued, beginning to pace
the floor. “They do not know—happily they do not know.”
Then he went on to tell me that which concerned the girl’s arrest that
afternoon.
It appeared that Elizabeth was one of those very few who were physically
almost perfect, and, as such, she had been in danger of being placed on
the list of those who were to enter the harems of the whites. David’s
sole hope of saving her lay in the fact that she was penalized six
points because her grandfather had had epileptic seizures. But she
approximated so closely to the Sanson norm—and the child had been
innocent enough to head the district list of those qualifying in
mentality by examination upon the Binet board—that there had been little
hope for her. This fear had been increased by the fact that Lembken had
seen Elizabeth, and had recently summoned her and her father to the
Council Hall, under the pretext of wishing to confer some favor upon an
old subordinate.
Now I gathered in the last threads of the skein. David had returned from
the Strangers’ Bureau that afternoon to find the apartment empty. Jones
had conveyed the news to him, and had secreted him in the Airscouts’
Fortress, pending a plan of rescue, a task which was only rendered
possible through the disaffection of Lembken’s airscouts. Jones had seen
me in my priest’s robes, and the two had come to the natural conclusion
that I had been a spy, playing one of the romantic parts in fashion
among the whites, and approved in the Council’s novels, in order to see
Elizabeth before selecting her. We had been discovered at the window,
the position of the little house had given Jones the opportunity of
rescuing the girl with his scoutplane, and, but for my return while the
rope still dangled before the aperture, I should never have known the
secret of Elizabeth’s disappearance. No wonder David had flown at my
throat.
“Now, we must act at once,” said David. “We are going to seek refuge in
the forests where our friends are hiding. Jones will carry us there
tonight when he starts in his scoutplane on patrol duty. It is a
difficult problem to pass the night patrol. But Jones can get us
through. And now, Arnold, what is your decision?”
“I made it long ago,” I answered.
“You are with us?”
“Indeed, I am.”
David wrung my hand hard. “You have decided wisely,” he said, “and by
your decision you have taken the only means possible to save the woman
you love. For the Sanson régime is crumbling, and your presence means,
what you cannot yet imagine, to the cause of liberty. We have five
thousand outlaws and fugitives from the defectives’ shops, scattered in
secret hiding places about London. We have made Ray rods in the shops
and have secreted provisions. Tonight the heads of the movement are to
assemble—”
“In the cellar where I lay so long!” I exclaimed, with sudden intuition.
“And Jones had been there with Ray rods when he found me!”
“Correct,” answered Jones, in his laconic manner.
“We remain here until midnight,” said David. “Then Jones will take us
when he starts to relieve the first patrol.”
“Be assured that I am with you to the end,” I said. And I swore that I
would do all in my power, so long as I had life and liberty, to fight
for human freedom. And as I swore I had a vision of the girl, mangled
and crushed upon the stones beneath that tropical, aerial hell beneath
the noble dome of England’s shameful temple.
I think the resolution in my manner must have enkindled David’s hopes,
for he put out his hand and caught mine again, and wrung and held it.
“You do not know, Arnold, how necessary you are to us,” he said. “But
tonight you shall be told. I am old, Arnold, and I have little courage.
I have lived through too many changes and frustrated hopes. I had grown
used and resigned to things that had come to seem unchangeable. The
freedom of my youth was only a dream to me. Sometimes I doubted whether
men had ever been free. It was your surprise, your ignorance, then the
indignation which you thought I did not see that made me begin to
understand my own degradation. And it was today’s events that gave me
heart to work with all my might for the cause to which I had only
languidly adhered. I have been one of the revolutionary committee for
months, and now I shall fight whole-heartedly, and you with me.”
“David,” I said with sudden conviction, “you are a Christian.”
His eyes suddenly seemed to blaze. “I am!” he cried. “As we all are. I
have temporized with evil all these years, but now I cannot do so any
more. The hope of the world can never be crushed out; it is spreading
everywhere. All of us are enlisted under that flag that was raised on
the Mount two thousand years ago. We see that without Christ, life is
intolerable. I knew your faith from the first, Arnold, although I dared
not speak, I knew it at the beginning because I thought you were a
Russian. That was why I befriended you. We know our own!” he cried
triumphantly.
Elizabeth put one arm about her father’s neck and extended her free hand
to me. I clasped it, and then the airscout’s; and so we pledged
ourselves.